The Fembot Collective is a collaboration among college faculty, students, artists, media producers and librarians who do research on the convergence of gender, new media, and technology. The collective is an offshoot of a research interest group within the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon but the community now spans North America. The collective envisions “a new model for open access, multimodal publishing that will provide a prototype for collaborative research, publication, and pedagogy in the humanities and hard sciences.”
The collective curates outlets such as the fembot zine, a platform for a range of feminist media criticism and production, books aren’t dead, monthly interviews with authors of recent feminist books on new media, science, and technology, and feminist works which showcases feminist works in progress by Fembot Collective members.
Most recently, the Fembot community and its many partners participated in the Writing Women into Wikipedia event on March 8th and 9th to insert topics about women and women’s history and contributions that are sorely lacking on Wikipedia. Women across geographic regions participated in the event which will hopefully spur continued efforts to write women more definitively into the digital sphere.
This collective is doing important work in examining and navigating the convergence of gender, technology, new media, and feminist production. Be sure to check out their site.
-Patricia Ekpo, Blog Editor
